Monday, August 31

Monday, August 31, 2015

Brave Control Solutions - Diana Chang

When I was first contacted by Brave for an internship opportunity, I had no idea that the company even existed. So I did my research and look up the company. The first thing that caught my eye about it was how Brave continued to refer to the company itself as a family. "Pfft yeah right", I thought. How could a company be like a family?

Not knowing what to expect, I accepted the internship offer and spent the whole July not being sure if I was looking forward to the placement or not. I imagined that it would just be another boring office job where I would be doing some sort of research on the side, because that's what they would do to keep high school interns who have no real work experience busy right?

Turned out that I was wrong, on about almost everything. Brave truly had a very family-like mind set and working environment. Everyone was extremely friendly and approachable. There was a pool table and a dart board in the kitchen, which also functioned as the dining room. In the kitchen cupboards, there were all sorts of snacks to munch on at any time. From the lunch time pool league to the fantasy football league at Brave, you really could feel how Brave was a family.

As for my duties as an intern, I could not have been more wrong with my assumptions. I had the delight to work as a software intern on Brave's new automated garage project. From working on the project, I got to expand my knowledge on the all-powerful JavaScript language and, "the only real dev language", NodeJS. I was only in charge of creating a program, an algorithm, which would give instructions on maneuvering the cars based on the user input while maximizing efficiency. However, before I had to leave the placement, I got to see the whole project demo in action, from the user entering request on the user interface (that another intern made) to the cars actually moving in the program that a software engineer wrote in Unity (after being processed through my program to give moving instructions).

Thanks to SHAD and Brave Control Solutions, I had the chance to intern and gain insights for my dream job before I even finished high school. The past two months were life changing and I feel more ready than ever to enter university, and in a few years, the workforce.